Former FBI Agents Face Preliminary Hearing on Hunter Biden Laptop Charges

The Justice Department has launched a series of high-profile investigations in the weeks leading up to next month’s midterm elections. Two former FBI officials are scheduled to appear in federal court in Washington on Tuesday to address charges that they misled lawmakers about their involvement in probes concerning Hunter Biden.

Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, former leaders of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, face criminal charges announced last Friday. The complaint alleges that in 2023, the two agents falsely denied having contemporaneous knowledge of a laptop that the Justice Department states Hunter Biden left at a computer repair shop in Delaware in 2019. They also allegedly denied participating in internal FBI discussions regarding the device.

The defense team has described the case as baseless and politically motivated. At the Tuesday hearing, lawyers are expected to challenge the procedural method used to charge the agents. Instead of a grand jury indictment, the case was brought forward via a criminal complaint signed by a magistrate judge. The Justice Department has faced difficulty securing grand jury indictments for similar high-profile matters in the nation’s capital in the past.

The case revisits the controversy surrounding the laptop’s discovery, which emerged in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential race. The New York Post reported obtaining a hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, a close ally of President Donald Trump. The publication cited emails suggesting foreign business dealings by the younger Biden. Democrats and intelligence officials raised concerns about Russian involvement, noting that the Trump administration’s intelligence community had assessed Moscow was attempting to undermine Joe Biden’s candidacy.

John Ratcliffe, the former national intelligence director, stated there were no signs of Russian actor involvement in the laptop’s provenance. The FBI subsequently investigated Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges, resulting in felony convictions. President Joe Biden pardoned his son in late 2024.

The Foreign Influence Task Force was established during the first Trump administration to monitor foreign influence campaigns. In August 2020, Floris and Benavides briefed Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, who were investigating Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. The senators later criticized the FBI, claiming their independent scrutiny was falsely linked to Russian disinformation efforts. The task force was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The criminal complaint marks a rare instance of the Justice Department pursuing a criminal case against former employees. Defense attorneys have denied any allegations of wrongdoing by their clients.